


Ashes

by MissIzzy



Series: Alternate Season 7 [1]
Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-11-21
Updated: 2016-02-01
Packaged: 2017-12-25 00:21:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/946441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissIzzy/pseuds/MissIzzy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first episode of an alternate season 7.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The weather on most of Earth was semi-controlled, but it had never seemed to rain as much in New Orleans as it had to Jake that summer. His grandfather thought so too. His father gave no opinion. His father never gave an opinion on much anymore. In fact, he rarely spoke at all.  
This was the tenth day in a row. The local news was predicting the longest streak of rain since 2430. The restaurant’s business suffered. Joseph Sisko’s work ethic didn’t. He kept all three of them busy, at least when he could keep Jake in the restaurant, and Jake had grown tired of fleeing into the rain. He washed fruits and vegetables, checked plates and glasses for damage, set tables and helped keep the restaurant in order. He had to insist on time off to write, and his writing wasn’t coming. It felt like his brain had rusted; he felt very, very tired.

When he first saw the Trill girl enter the restaurant and his grandfather escort her to a table, Jake didn’t think too much of it. He did think of poor Jadzia Dax for a moment, but he saw no reason why any random Trill should be connected to her, and the restaurant got plenty of customers from offworld.

He was waiting on the neighboring table when he first noticed the way she was looking around, and at him and his grandfather, and around the room. She didn’t look too comfortable. It was as if she knew this place, and the two of them, and wasn’t sure how to deal with it or them.

By the time Jake came to wait on the young Trill, after leaving her a few minutes with her drink, he was fairly certain she was the new host of Dax. It was the only explanation for why she was staring him down as if she was both afraid of who he was and relieved it was only him; he and Jadzia Dax had never known each other especially well, after all. He tried to kept a normal impersonal demeanor, however, as he greeted her with a “Hi, can I take your order?”

“Hi, Jake,” she said, clearly without thinking, then caught herself; he saw her eyes flick to his name tag, as if reassuring herself that at least she had an easy explanation for knowing his name, if not for using it like that. “I’ll, um, have the, um...” When she had begun to speak, she’d sure sounded like she’d known what she wanted, but it seemed that halfway through her sentence she’d suddenly decided that she didn’t know after all, and was fighting an internal war to decide. Jadzia Dax had always ordered the same dish in this restaurant, his father had mentioned when they’d first gotten here; Jake wished he’d added what it was.

“Do you need more time to decide?” he asked gently. “I can come back.”

“Yes, thank you,” she said, and her face flushed with gratitude. He had already noticed she looked cute, and now he saw she was prettier still when she had some color in her complexion.

There was another table waiting for him, so he left the mysterious Trill and for a minute or so forgot about her. But when he took their orders into the kitchen, his grandfather said to him, “Jake, I need to talk to you for a moment,” gestured for his sous-chef to look after his pot, and led the two of them to the far end of the kitchen, where they wouldn’t be overheard. “The Trill,” he said, his voice holding an urgency he didn’t display that often.

“She’s Dax,” said Jake immediately. “Or at least I’m pretty sure she is. She greeted me as if she knew me.”

“All right, then. But we need to be certain of it...look, get her food, let her eat, make sure she’s well accommodated; this’ll be easier if she’s in a good mood, and I won’t end up with an unsatisfied customer over this if I can help it. But when she asks for the check, I want you to first ask if she’s Dax, and if she is, if she’s willing to talk to your father.”

“That’s not very polite,” Jake had to say.

“Make it as polite as you can, but damn it, Jake, someone needs to get through to him! You can’t. I can’t. Dax might be able to. I don’t really know how this whole symbiont thing works, to tell you the truth, but if she has any of Curzon or Jadzia’s feelings, hopefully she’ll listen to you. Tell her how he’s been; she’ll have to listen.”

Jake was absolutely in agreement with his grandfather that someone had to intervene with his father, who after three months was showing no signs of being any better than when Jake had accompanied him back to his quarters after Jadzia’s funeral and as soon as they were alone told him he was taking leave. He nodded and said “I’ll see what I can do.”

He wasn’t looking forward to it, though; it seemed a rude thing to do, especially since he knew Trills were supposed to have some detachment between their lives. Of course Jadzia hadn’t minded continuing her friendship with his father, but this new host might want to move on.

Yet she’d come there, he thought. Of all the restaurants of all the cities of all the planets. It couldn’t have been just coincidence. Unless she’d just wanted to say goodbye, that was a possibility. A private mental goodbye, not involving any actual people, just places. If that was the case, she wasn’t going to be happy with him.

Being a waiter meant having to concentrate, so Jake couldn’t think about any of this much, which was a good thing, because it was hard enough for him not to as it was. During one spare moment as he made his way from one table back to the kitchen he did think he was feeling a little too nervous about this, if only because his fingers were trembling a little bit and he was having trouble reading his own shorthand. It was a simple pair of questions, he told himself, and he already had the words for an apology prepared too, if he needed them. And come to think of it, he had never seen Jadzia Dax lose her cool; he’d watched her argue with his father once, but she’d been ice then rather than fire, so that might keep this new Dax from making a scene even if she did get angry.

When he returned to her table she ordered a gumbo quickly, and when he gave the order to his father he marked that it was indeed Jadzia’s usual, and took charge of the cooking of it himself. “I thinks she liked it a certain way,” he told Jake.

As it cooked, and he continued to work, Jake found himself stealing glances at the girl. She never looked comfortable; he spotted her fingers constantly drumming the table. He found himself thinking she was even prettier than he’d first thought; she wasn’t much older than him, ignoring the symbiont’s age obviously, and had dark boyish hair that settled gracefully along the line of spots that flowed down the sides of her face and neck. She had been wearing a black raincoat, but when she removed it he saw she wore a Starfleet uniform, with a blue collar and a single pip.

“Your gumbo, madam,” he announced as he brought it, and watched as she closed her eyes and breathed in its smell, for a moment her features relaxing as a broad smile spread across her face. It made her go from pretty to beautiful, he watched her throat flash and for a moment Jake forgot to breathe. But then the moment passed and she looked uneasy again. Jake found himself not wanting to bother her; clearly she was upset about something, and now wasn’t the time to be pestering about a connection from the symbiont’s past lives. He found himself asking if he could get her anything else with his mind far away; he was relieved when she said no thanks.

After that he went through the rest of the evening less than ease, watching out of the corner of his eye as she ate her way through her dinner, listening to the rain outside get louder; maybe she’d think it just as well to stay a while longer. When she was done, Jake took the checking pad out to her table, but kept it behind his back. She saw him coming, and he watched her stiffen.

“Excuse me,” he forced himself to say. “I don’t mean to bother you or anything, but are you...?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m Dax. Ezri Dax, I mean, not Jadzia Dax, obviously...this is weird.”

“No, it’s okay,” he said. “It’s just that...well...” He had to ask it, he told himself.

“You know why I came here tonight?” she sighed. He said no. “I wanted to see Ben.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” said Jake, intensly relieved. “Granddad wants you to talk to him.”

“Oh,” Immediately her expression changed, her eyes and mouth rearranging themselves into something that reminded Jake very strongly of Jadzia. “He’s bad, isn’t he? I heard about what happened, with the wormhole-and is it true the orbs have stopped working? I mean, Jadzia's memory of everything after Dukat attacked her is really fuzzy, but I myself heard...”

“It’s true.” Jake dropped his voice. “He’s in the back right now, cleaning vegetables. He’ll do anything granddad asks of him except he really doesn’t like waiting tables, and he doesn’t want to do anything else. You can come back there right now if you want to.”

“All right then,” and she followed him through the restaurant, glancing around as if she expected stares, though there were none.

Captain Sisko was seated near the back door; he probably would have been out on the step if it hadn’t been so wet out. He had a handful of carrots in his hands and two bucketfuls of them next to him. He’d probably gotten through enough for the rest of the night and the lunch sitting the next day. Jake picked up the bucket of cleaned ones-his granddad would be so pleased he could finally tell the difference-which caused his father to look up, and see who was with him. “Ensign Ezri Dax would like to meet you,” he told him, and hurried off as fast as the heavy load of carrots would allow him to go. He heard her “Hi, Ben” and his father’s hello back before the ordinary noise of the kitchen started to drown them safely out.

His grandfather intercepted him. “Did she agree?”

“Not only that, she wanted to already. Though to be honest I don’t know if she’s in shape herself for this sort of thing. I think the whole joining with the symbiont thing has left her a little, I don’t know, unnerved maybe.”

“Well I think she was supposed to be selected because they thought she was the right person for it. But maybe it is a little disconcerting at first. Kind of wish I’d asked Jadzia about it now.” There was more regret than just over that in his voice; in the end, neither Ben Sisko’s father nor his son had known either of the two hosts of Dax they’d met so far as well as they would have liked. If Ezri hung around, Jake thought, he might try to fix that with her.

The rest of the evening went by with Jake continuing to wait tables, his grandfather continuing to operate in the kitchen, and both of them trying not to let themselves be distracted from their jobs by what was going on in the kitchen corner. Every time Jake came to his grandfather, he got a vague report of how they were doing, “There were some really intense words about ten minutes ago, I think,” or “I do believe I heard them laughing.” Finally he came to him for one last piece of news: “She’s gone. Left about two minutes ago, while you were taking orders from the big Duque party on the other side of the restaurant. She said she would probably come back tomorrow, though. I think that’s enough for us to know right now.”

It was, but to Jake’s surprise, his father spoke to him about it before the night was up, but mostly to reveal an astonishing piece of information about Ezri. “She wasn’t trained to be a host,” he explained. “But she was the only Trill crew member on board the ship was taking the Dax symbiont back to Trill, and it took a turn for the worse and had to be joined with someone immediately. I think it’s extremely difficult psychologically, to adjust to a symbiont’s memories if you aren’t trained to do it.”

“So did she come here for help?” Jake asked, wondering if the blind could really lead the blind here.

“I think so. I’d like to help her, though. If I can.”

When he repeated this conversation to his grandfather, however, Joseph Sisko sounded pleased. “Maybe he just needs something he can care about enough to snap himself out of it. Anyway, what he’s been doing hasn’t been working. Let’s just stand aside and let them talk. For now.”

Deep Space 9

Colonel Kira Nerys had been having a very busy ten weeks. Admiral Ross had advised her that he could only keep Captain Sisko’s position empty for so long, but offered to stall with Starfleet Command if it was needed and she wanted him to, and so for now, she was completely in command of the station for the first time. If it did come to a replacement for Sisko, Ross had said, he or she might even end up below her on the chain of command. She thought the Bajoran government was hoping so; she especially thought her recent promotion had been given with that in mind. But at the moment, Nerys was refusing to think about that, simply because she wasn’t ready to consider the possibility that he wasn’t come back. Not yet.  
It wasn’t the only place where the senior staff had been downsized. There was to be no immediate replacement for Jadzia; maybe after the war there would be a place for a science officer again. Also Worf had put in for a transfer, and was now with his old crewmates on the Enterprise-E. It hadn’t seemed that drastic at the time, Odo was still insisting; he’d managed the area security on his own for four years under Starfleet without an Strategic Operations Office. But it had become a different sector since then, with much more activity, both criminal and combative, some of which is it wasn’t even politically wise for Odo to deal with.

Eight weeks after Worf’s departure, with no replacement in sight, when Nerys entered her lover’s office, the first thing on her mind was the question of when he had last regenerated. He’d started keeping his old bucket in his office again.

He knew she was coming off shift, so he emerged wearily from the holding area, and posed his “Evening?” as a question.

“Yeah,” she said, “and you are not working overtime again, and don’t argue with me, that’s final, and I’ll make it an order if I’ll have to.”

She’d thought it a 50-50 chance that Odo would protest this. When she saw his wry smile, she knew he wasn’t going to that day. “Very well,” he said, and as she reached his desk, he took hold of her shoulders and pulled their foreheads together. Which from a strategic perspective had actually been an error on his part, because it let her notice his skin was a bit too tender, slightly liquidy. Now that their relationship had become months old, Nerys was familiar with those things that had once been completely unknown to her, such as the signs of when he was only a couple of hours away from really needing to regenerate. “Out of curiosity,” he said, “did anything particularly horrendous happen today?”

“No,” she sighed, “just the usual. If I have to interrupt my day to field a call from the Vedek Assembly one more time...”

“No Winn?”

“No, she’s still off in the...” Damn, why couldn’t she remember? Maybe she needed sleep too. “In the...”

“Telyet Province?” supplied Odo. “You said something about her and there.”

“Yeah, there, thanks. New guy today. Young guy, new to the Assembly, probably.”

“Lots of those lately,” noted Odo, and the grim tone was obvious, and with good reason; most of the new Vedeks were getting their positions because the old ones had started committing suicide. Which was honestly causing Nerys more pain than anything else, that particular statistic concerning Bajor. The closing off of the Prophets-she refused to think of them as gone; they had to still be there somewhere, the departure of Sisko and Worf, even the death of Jadzia, were nothing to the knowledge that when Dukat had done whatever he’d done in the Temple, he’d not only struck all those blows, he’d found a way to start murdering her people yet again.

Odo knew that, knew how much it hurt, so he pulled her closer and let her bury her face in the side of his head. But here wasn’t the place for such gestures, whatever displays of public affection they happen to have impulsively engaged in in the past, especially not when she was now the station's commander, so Nerys pulled away and whispered, “Let’s get out of here.”

Dinner in their quarters-officially their quarters, now, with his various objects arranged about the living area; she ate while he watched, and she deliberately sat facing away from the viewport-not that it worked; she was still too aware of the window being there. How many times had she stood just in front of it, and seen the Celestial Temple open up for a ship to go in and come out-not for a year before the attack, of course, but still more than enough times before that?

Odo, as was his usual way, waited for her to ask, “Do you want to know why they were calling?” He nodded immediately. “They got a communiqué from the Dominion a few days ago. A few days ago, and they took this long to tell anyone, me, Shakaar, anyone! Apparently the Dominion actually tried to flatter the Vedek Assembly into entering into some sort of negotiation with them behind the government’s back.”

“They’re trying to play Bajor’s powers against each other.” Of course Odo got it immediately. “You don’t think they’ll get anywhere, do you?”

“It bothers me that it took them this long to tell us,” sighed Nerys. “But I don’t they can, really. If only because an organization like the current Vedek Assembly isn’t that good at keeping secrets.”

“If, on the other hand,” Odo mused, “they started working with only a couple of the high-ranking Vedeks...or with the Kai.”

“Yeah,” Nerys agreed. Kai Winn was the real danger, and they both knew it. She was a woman in desperate straits at the moment, her enemies have been provided with an environment in which they would finally be listened to. Meanwhile, rumor had gotten out about her being responsible for stopping the Reckoning, and if she hadn’t done that, everyone was sure, this never would have happened. For that matter, Jadzia would have lived. Thinking about that made Nerys angry all over again. Winn was getting what she deserved, no doubt, but the fact was that made her dangerous.

“So what’s the government going to do?” asked Odo. “Do you know?”

“No idea,” she shrugged. “The one thing I do know is that the new Romulan contingent is still coming to the station, and that fact was deemed important enough that I had to spend an hour giving them answers to questions where they pretty much knew all the information already.” She wasn’t exactly happy about the Romulans either, which Odo knew.

“So what do we do about this latest piece of wonderful news?” he asked, but as he did so, she noticed his hands on the table looked like they were about to melt.

“We figure out what to do after you’ve regenerated,” she replied. His only response to that was a rueful grin.

Odo liked to regenerate around her bed, even though she sometimes accidentally stepped in him in the morning. It was a little early, but it had been a long day, and she found herself wanting to lie down. She hadn’t meant to fall asleep, spread out on top of the bedclothes with her uniform and even her boots still on, but she drifted off anyway.

She dreamed she was walking through the corridors of the station, looking for someone, Captain Sisko maybe, but there was noone anywhere; she was all alone. If she could find a lift and get to the Promenade she might be able to find them, but there weren’t any anywhere. She had a vague idea she might also be looking for his baseball, and that she needed to return it to him, but she had absolutely no idea where that thing was.

Finally she decided to get to the emergency ladders and climb for it. She did find one of them, one connected to the station’s hull itself, where the winds buffeted her so hard she had to grip the rungs tight as she climbed, and her hands sweated so hard she didn’t know how she could get up 500 whole levels without losing her grip. She was only starting to realize how tired she was too.

She wasn’t sure how far she’d climbed when she first scented the stink of burning flesh. It was coming from the floor she was passing, and though the hatch wasn’t there, she had to leap from the rungs into the open corridor. She didn’t know if she could do it; she could have easily when she was younger, but now her limbs felt weaker than they once had been.

But she had to, and so she hurtled herself through the air with all her might. Her hands and knees hit the corridor floor hard, the impact knocking through her whole body and sending shocks through her system that it took her a frighteningly long moment to recover from; it was as if she was frozen in the transporter. But after that she was on her feet, and the smell was so strong it had to be close by.

There was only one door in the whole corridor; she ran to it. For a moment she thought it wouldn’t open, but it slid aside.

There before her lay a mangled body, so badly burnt she couldn’t even tell its sex. It wore a Starfleet combadge, but there was nothing else to give it any identity, and it almost felt as if it wasn’t anyone in general anyway, just another one of many, because they were all dead, she didn’t even know how she knew that, but she did.

She awoke short of breath, with the terrifying feeling she’d just overlooked something important.

She hastily pulled herself up and looked about. Odo was still regenerating on the floor. She asked the computer for the time, and learned she’d been asleep for about two hours.

Ordinarily she would have dismissed her dream as just her mind reacting to the anxiety of the last ten weeks, but this hadn’t felt much like a case of that. If things had been normal she would have been sure her dream had been sent from the Prophets, but when noone had heard from them lately she wouldn’t dare to presume they’d come to speak to her now like this.

And even if they had, what exactly had that dream meant? There were the obvious fears, for the safety of those fighting the current war, those individuals like Jadzia had been, whom she’d come to care about during the past six years. She might now have to worry that it was a prophetic dream, and that it meant she’d lose them all.

Not feeling at all refreshed, but too restless to sleep, or eat, or to do anything else either, she wandered over to the viewport and looked again, out at those tiny distant stars. Suddenly she was angry at them, those stars, and the Prophets, and Pah-Wraiths, and Captain Sisko, and Admiras Ross and Starfleet, and of course Dukat, and Kai Winn, who she almost held as more responsible for the loss of the Prophets as the now mentally unstable former commander. If she hadn’t interfered for the worst of reasons...but thinking about how things could have been was too painful, and she had to cut her mind off right there.

She left the viewport then, glanced down at Odo but decided to let him regenerate a little longer without any disturbance, instead wandering to the far side of the room, where she’d left a padd loaded with the Starfleet report on activity in the sector. It was while reading those she missed Worf the most; among his other duties he had prepared weekly reports like this for Captain Sisko, except distilled to highlight what the Klingon had judged the priority, and usually been right about. These general reports were long and cumbersome, and by the time she reached the important information in them, she often had too much of a headache to properly process it.

She actually had only read two-thirds before going off to her shift that day, and she thought she could get through most of the rest in an hour if she focused. But focusing was hard with too little sleep and the dream she’d just had.

The only words she really read at first were those Starfleet had already thrown at her, three days ago when they’d wanted someone from the station who had experienced with Cardassian engineering to help them out with a ship they’d managed to take over, and she hadn’t been able to spare anyone with the expertise. They’d wanted Miles, of course, but he’d been busier than any of them, because when a population was bitter due to losing the Prophets, and it was generally known that they’d been lost due to some sort of event that had happened on the station(officially what had happened in the temple was classified information, but there was only so much of it they’d been able to conceal, especially with a body left lying on the scene), vandalistic sabotage was an unfortunate but obvious result. So far it hadn’t been anything that threatened the stability of the station’s basic systems, but she knew that was one of his many worries. So no, no time or energy for any extra work off the station.

They were going to make her pay for it, Nerys knew. They needed more crew on the station, and now they weren’t likely to get them. Being deprived of two Starfleet officers without replacement ought to have afforded them two more, but Starfleet’s billeting system was a complex one, one even Admiral Ross was having problems getting anything out of, to the point she was even trying to wrestle a new militia billet out of the Bajoran government. But she couldn’t hold out much hope there; it was very hard to get one of those in the best of times, and with an unprecedented amount of officers now resigning their commissions, it was probably just about impossible.

Her mind was still lingering over this officer problem, wondering if there was any way she could think of to even get some sort of assistance for poor Miles, when her eyes wandered across a paragraph that she found herself having to stop and go back to read properly. Then she went back again to read it over. It probably didn’t mean what she thought it did, she told herself. It might not even have anything to do with the Bajoran star system and sun; she did have a habit of assuming any piece of news she didn’t specifically know was about some other planet was about Bajor.

Still, how many other unusually celestial phenomena were there in the sector? Especially ones that had engaged in “unprecedented unexplainable behavior,” which would be what the Temple closing up would’ve looked like to non-believers? If only it the summary had thought to provide the name of the star affected, or even described how it had been affected; she could have tried to determine if they were talking about a wormhole then.

There was nothing else of significance in the report that she hadn’t already known about. She put the padd down, considered going to look at the newsnet to see if she could get more information about this celestial phenomena that was behaving unexplainably, but she was just too tired. The state he had been in before regenerating, waking Odo up wasn't practical yet, so she took ten more minutes to replicate and eat a small meal, then lay back down.

Thankfully she had no more dreams that night, and she woke in the morning feeling much more rested than she’d expected to, though that might have been because she overslept. Odo was gone, having apparently decided to let her sleep in; he’d had to go in earlier than usual. She had just enough time to take a quick shower, wolf down her breakfast, and race for Ops.

She went running her fingers through her hair, her braids from the previous day a little matted. It sure had been easier when she had kept her hair more closely cropped down, but Odo loved to melt his hands in it, and she herself loved it too when he did, the soft, warm pulse of it against her scalp, so shoulder-length it was.

Under the sonic waves it maybe got a little less wild, while the sound beating against her skin soothed her body and mind both. But she spent just long enough to think especially about the dream combined with the events of the past weeks and the sabotage especially. It was unlikely, in theory, that she should have a prophetic dream just about something mundane like that, but maybe if it was on a large enough scale?

She had thought about it too much by the time she was heading out to Ops. As she made her way to the turbolift, she kept tense, as if, absurd as she knew it to be, Dominion ships would suddenly swoop down on the station with blasters blasting.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A mysterious woman is sent back in time.

“Personal Log, timeflux, unable to determine stardate, Earth date as time has passed on this ship: November 21, 2751. That’s ten days we’ve been in here and the crew wants to know what’s going on. I want to tell them. But then again, five more hours and they’re probably going to find out this time, and we have to hope they’re too shocked to mutiny. Or too weak in their consciences.” Taddus Swann, first office of the _U.S.S. Wells_ , tried to beat down his own conscience as he spoke. _This has to be done,_ he told himself. _She wouldn’t even exist in the first place if it wasn’t for this._ “We’re about ready to bring Subject B-E339 out of stasis. From what I understand, she has a few years of conscious existence under her belt, so that should make this easier, but she doesn’t know her mission and she is not to know any more than she has to.”

His comm beeped, and he ended the log. Sure enough, it was the specialist, summoning him to the sickbay. This, the greeting of the Hybrids, always seemed to fall to him.

He must have looked very grim indeed as he made his way there; the crewmen in the corridors all hastily turned away from him. A certain pair of Ensigns Lee and Tormouss, whom he knew to be very chatty, fell dead silent at his passing.

He would have needed that stance, too, to order to ward the Chief Medical Officer away when he arrived, but he had already made himself scarce. Taddus needed his gaze only for the eye scanner in the corner, which registered him as allowed before opening a door well concealed within the sickbay’s walls.

Dr. Masssssss didn’t looked over as he came in; he was focused on the monitor from which the Hybrid’s stats were displayed. She herself was in dry hibernation, hooked up to the wall, already clad in the Starfleet uniform of the time period she was to go back to. It was only the second look Taddus had gotten of her. She was luckier than many a Hybrid in terms of aesthetics, her sharp Cardassian-shaped bones and Trill spots blending well into the gnarled brown of her Hydillian forearms and hands. He recalled her genetic make-up: 32.7% Cardassian, 31.9% Hydillian, 29.9% Trill, the rest whatever odds and ends could be made to work with that makeup-largely Klingon, apparently, but among all the various DNA samples that had gone into the petri dish was that of a mixed race individual descended from the one and only James Kirk. Dr. Masssssss has nicknamed her Jamie, and they might very well use that for her name.

“All systems a go?” he asked.

“She’s in perfect health, Commander,” replied the biologist. “Ready to talk to her?”

“Ready. Wake her up.”

A series of beeps, and Taddus took his eyes up to the girl’s eyelids, so as to have eye contact with her as soon as she was conscious. She blinked herself awake as her breather detached, and he saw the usual confusion that hybrids in hibernation experienced before remembering who they were and this happened all the time with them.

“Good day,” he said to her. “I am first officer of this ship, and I will be directing you today.”

“What is my task?” she asked.

“You are to go back to the year 2375, Stardate 52146.4. You will be in the city of New Orleans, on Earth. Captain Benjamin Sisko, commander of the space station Deep Space 9 by the Gamma Quadrant Wormhole, is on indefinite leave due to a crisis of confidence, and is staying at his father’s home in New Orleans, where a Bajoran cult extremist named Fala Rutti will try to assassinate him. You will warn him of this assassination attempt and they should apprehend Fala before he gets anywhere near his target. If all goes well, you will shortly after be appointed to their senior staff as their new Strategic Operations Officer. Then you will wait until further instructions.”

That all this would be accomplished Taddus didn’t even have to doubt. The records already had Fala being apprehended, as was quite common for events cause by a time traveler in the short time period after their arrival, and while the appointment records for Deep Space 9 were actually incomplete, he did have enough information on the manpower difficulties the station had experienced at the time that he was fairly certain that once one of them did the work at Starfleet Command neither acting commander Colonel Kira nor Captain Sisko would object to having her there.

“I understand,” she said. “Makes sense; they’d been training me for a position they called that.”

“Glad to hear it,” he said. “They’ll be ready to send you back in about forty minutes. Are you hungry?” Sometimes hybrids were when they came out of hibernation, and Taddus had discovered that if there was time before they were sent back, it was useful to start building rapport during that period.

“Yes, I am,” she replied.

“Come along, then,” he said. “Do you have any preferred foods?”

She did not, so in the main part of the sickbay, he ordered the soup he knew had the most potassium of all those on offer, and she ate looking grateful. He noticed how often she rubbed her hands when her spoon was down, and asked, “Sensation problems in your hands?”

“Not too bad,” she said. “Just tend to get numb when I’m in hibernation.”

“How much have you been in hibernation?” Taddus asked, partly to be friendly, but also because it might be useful to know.

“Only for travel, sometimes,” she replied. “And generating, I suppose, but I was told I grew very quickly. But my first few months we had a banditta after one of our scientists, so there was a bit of running. Less after that.” _Bandittas_ were the common term for the assailants that attacked ships in timefluxes, where the _Wells_ was, and where most Hydilian hybrids were developed. There seemed to be an alarmingly large number of them for some reason, though no one had yet uncovered any evidence of them being organized together.

“Sounds rough,” said Taddus.

“During my first two years I had nightmares,” she agreed. “I needed counseling for it in the end. But I’m okay now.”

The doctor still wasn’t appearing; he clearly wasn’t going to. It would be best, Taddus thought, to keep her away from the rest of the crew until he took her to be transported; this would be much easier if she was just someone they’d heard talked about and never actually met. So he ordered a pair of drinks from the replicator-warm, sweet-tasting, and non-intoxicating, and as she accepted and drank with disturbingly little hesitation, he sat down, and was pleased when she did the same. “Have you ever been on a planet?” he asked her.

Her answer was about what he expected: “Once, late in my second year. They took me down to Cardassia Prime, to this mountain ridge, where it was very cold and no one has lived there for much of its history. It was a very vast and wide place. They said I might or might not go there for my mission.”

That sounded like someone had gone back having heard of her mission to arrange this visit for her. That actually was not a good thing; this was the kind of mission where it was better she not know what awaited her. “What did you see, exactly?” he asked her. “Did you meet with any of the locals?”

“No locals in the area,” she answered, which he was glad for; it helped if she had no outside contact. She didn’t sound disappointed by that, either, as she went on to describe what she’d seen instead, how she’d never seen anything huge like mountains, or a sky with anything other than stars, or landscapes such as had been visible from the peaks, except from very, very far up above. He ended up learning she really wanted to learn how to swim, and she had told her companions that when they had found a stream, but it had been way too fast-running a one to consider it there. Unfortunately he didn’t see how her mission was likely to provide her with an opportunity.

“Bajor is a beautiful planet, isn’t it?” she asked. “That’s the only other thing they told me about my mission, that I might go there, too.”

“It is now,” he said, “though remember you are going back to less than a decade after its occupation by the old Cardassian Empire ended, so don’t expect it to look as it would in our current time, even if you find yourself on the planet, which you might not get around to, of course.”

“I hope I do, though,” she said. “Maybe I’ll have some time free after my mission.” Taddus did not respond to that, instead lapsing into silence. He watched her sip up the last of her soup and put the bowl aside. “That’s much better. I always feel better after eating. Sometimes I wonder if I’m still existing, really, before I eat.” That Taddus has nothing to say to either, but she continued chattering on, almost as if she sensed the discomfort in the silence, even though they weren’t touching, which Hydilians needed to do to sense emotions. “I need to remember the name of this soup. Next time I’m going to request it.”

Taddus hastily rose. “Perhaps we should make our way to the Transit Room. They may want to read you for the calculations.”

The Transit Room was technically a transporter room, but it was generally called the Transit Room to avoid confusion, especially since people trying to do normal beaming from it typically ended up dead if they were lucky. The transportation done there, through time as well as through space, required expert work and even then a little bit of luck, not to mention so much power the _Wells_ would have to lower all systems by 5% while their hybrid was being transported. When the two of them arrived there, they found Lieutenants Moi and Klargi, their two specialists, poring over the two huge displays that filled most of the room. Also there was Special Agent Five, which made Taddus glad; he no doubt brought his companion’s new identity.

He greeted her with it: “Lieutenant Commander Jamie Thale. You will find her your life history here.” He gave her a chitten; in her enlarged fingers it looked so tiny Taddus, very unusually for him, was struck by the wonder of how much information was no doubt in such a spec of metal. “Usual origin story; I’m sure they’ve told you about that already.”

“Thank you,” she said to him, carefully putting the chitten away in her belt. Mildly surprising; hybrids often had the ability to plug it directly into their heads. “Are we ready to go, sirs?”

“Almost,” said Lieutenant Moi, and indeed, he had taken up position by the main control panel. “You should take your position, so we can do the projection.”

Once Commander Thale was on the pad, she has to stay completely still until she was transported, and when she went straight through it Taddus assumed all talk was done; if only because she was discouraged even from moving her mouth too much. But this apparently did not stop Five from walking as close as he was allowed and saying to her, “Remember, your mission is more important than you may ever realize. I hope you are aware we only do this for the most critical of causes.”

Taddus wished he could believe that, but he wasn’t really sure. He had seen many of these missions happen, and while information was always on a need to know basis and that usually didn’t include any reasons, there had been too many where there didn’t even seem to be any probable cause at all, leaving him to wonder if some very powerful person merely wanted history changed. At least this wasn’t one of those, though; with the location being Deep Space 9 during the Dominion War, he didn’t have to know exactly what she was supposed to be involved with to be sure it was important. Or at least, he hoped it was for more reasons than was usual.

Commander Thale was more fortunate, perhaps, in that with her limited experience she had no such doubts. Or maybe unfortunate, though Taddus might be the only one on board who knew that yet; even Five might not have yet been told. With none of these ideas, and with no fear either, she acknowledged his words with her eyes and held herself high and ramrod straight.

“Ready,” said Lieutenant Moi.

“Send her back,” Taddus ordered. “Good luck, Commander,” he added as the process started, and he thought her mouth actually perked up a touch before she started to dissolve into the unique dark steel glimmer that shrouded those beamed through both space and time simultaneously.

A moment or so after the last of her vanished, Lieutenant Klargi said, “Fully resolved without complications; I can confirm with 99% certainty she is at her destination.”

“Come with me up to the bridge,” Taddus said to Five. “We’ll probably mostly contact her from the Ready Room. It might be a bit of time before we can-for us, I mean.”

 

####  **New Orleans**

 

When Ezri Dax showed up again the next morning, between the breakfast and lunch sittings, so he had to let her in, Jake was so glad to see her he nearly hugged her, only stopping himself as he saw her flinch back, surprisingly hard, but then obviously she had her issues. “Dad’s in the back,” he told her, and she thanked him and hurried past.

It was once again raining, but even as Jake stared at the thick water sluicing the windows, he thought maybe he’d go out anyway, if he could only find an umbrella. He was starting to think his grandfather was hiding them from him.

So when the old man himself came in, Jake opened his mouth to ask for an umbrella, but first his grandfather said, “The two of us need to talk about how long we’re going to let her work alone.”

“We might need to be careful because of her as well as him,” Jake noted. “I think she’s a little uncomfortable about coming here, especially since I’ve actually read about this, and Trill hosts are supposed to have a lot more divide between their different lives than even Jadzia Dax did, and you can even get exiled from Trill society for too much ‘reassocation,’ though they described that as romantic, so that might only be a problem with Commander Worf.”

“Do you think she’ll only want to stay around for so long?” his grandfather asked, and Jake shrugged. He’d wondered about that already, of course, but now had no real idea.

“I never knew that, you know,” his grandfather said softly. “Jadzia never said anything about that. Do you think she was risking serious trouble, associating with all of us?”

“It never sounded like it,” said Jake. “Or at least, I hope she wasn’t.”

In any case, he couldn’t help thinking, her seeing him should be fine. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more he hoped she didn’t run away, but at least let him get to know her a bit, because he knew he hadn’t known either of her hosts well enough to be in danger of getting to know her for anyone besides her.

Just then they heard another knock on the door, and looked at each other in confusion. “Were you expecting anyone else?” Jake asked.

“No, were you?”

“No.” They hesitated.

The knocking came again, louder, and then a female voice called, “Please let me in! It’s important!”

“Very often in such cases it isn’t,” his grandfather muttered, but he nonetheless went and opened the door. “Or worse.”

Jake thought the Starfleet-uniformed female at the door might have been mixed race, except that she clearly had traits from more than two races: Cardassian ridges, Trill spots, and hands that belonged to neither race, though Jake wasn’t sure what race they belonged to. If there had been a fourth race he could identify, he might think she was the product of two mixed-race parents, though maybe the fourth race was Terran or some similar race whose features became subsumed easily, but that wasn’t the kind of child who was conceived easily. He thought sadly of his dad mentioning Jadzia Dax had been at the Temple to thank the Prophets, just in case they’d helped with the success of her operation to be able to conceive by Commander Worf.

But startling as even the sight of her was, that was nothing compared to when she said, “Has someone just come to see Captain Benjamin Sisko?”

“What is it any business of yours?” asked her father.

“I’m here to prevent him from being assassinated,” she answered in the same terse voice she’d asked the question.

“Sounds like a good answer to me,” said Jake, already turning to run in there and seize that Trill, wondering now if she really had anything to do with the Dax symbiont.

“Wait.” His grandfather’s voice was so insistent it actually stopped him. “What do you know about my son?”

“He is about to be targeted by a Bajoran named Fala Rutti who proclaims religious allegiance with the Pah-wraiths,” was the answer, which made Jake relax, the relief almost crushing him.

“Well there’s a Trill who’s just come to see him,” said his grandfather, “but we haven’t seen any Bajorans in these parts for ages. Now how do you know about this planned assassination?”

“When I was trying to contact someone else, my communication signal got mixed up with one going between two members of the conspiracy and I heard their conversation. I do not know the exact time they will attempt to strike, but it sounded like it would be sometime within a handful of days. I would advise he not be alone during the next week, and you keep an eye out for any Bajorans that do appear in this area.”

“Have you gone to law enforcements?” Jake was pretty sure she hadn’t been done speaking, but his grandfather very clearly didn’t care. “Anyone who might help out?”

“I have not had the chance to do so yet. I did not know when this assassination attempt might take place, so I did not know if there was time to go to anyone who would not be on the immediate scene.” Why wasn’t she using contractions? She seemed rather weird, really. But somehow Jake still found himself believing her.

“I’ll contact them, then,” said his grandfather. “Stay here.”

When he was gone she went to the window, but there wasn’t much to see through the rain. Jake found himself thinking out loud, “I don’t think an assassin would come through the front. I think the back’s more likely. That’s often where dad ends up in the evening anyway.”

“But he wouldn’t be there right now,” said the female, and she left the window and tried to go to the back where their first visitor was still with Jake’s father. Jake grabbed her arm to stop her, and she halted, but remained facing in that direction. “Did you have any Bajoran customers this morning?” she asked. “Are you sure they aren’t hiding in the kitchen?”

“I can’t remember any,” said Jake, though uneasily he thought if he hadn’t waited this Fala Rutti’s table he might have escaped his notice. But he couldn’t have snuck into the kitchen, he reminded himself. His grandfather would’ve almost certainly have noticed...he thought.

But it turned out not to matter, when a moment later Joseph Sisko emerged with his son and Ezri Dax, both of them looking pretty disturbed. “I’ve called the police,” he said. “They’ll want to talk to you, m’am.”

Was it just Jake’s imagination, or did the strange woman’s face show a split second of panic, before she nodded and said, “I don’t have much more to tell them than I’ve just told you, but very well.”

“Meanwhile,’ his grandfather continued, “let’s get you out of here, Ben. I would assume this assassin is relying on being able to get at you here in the restaurant, so we’ll make sure he can’t. We’ll go down to storage.”

“But what if he has snuck in there?” asked Dax. “Maybe I’d better go with him.”

It was understandable, Jake guessed, that his grandfather had the paranoid reaction to that, saying harshly, “There’s no need for that, Ensign Dax; when he is on his guard my son is perfectly capable to taking care of himself, and you ought to know that.”

That was maybe a little too mean of his, and it caused Jake to say, “You should stay with us here in the restaurant, though. The more people around, the better, I think.”

No one else objected to this, and so after Jake’s father left the other four of them sat down to wait. Jake ended up with Dax at the same table. Initially she looked out at the window and not at him, and normally, he might have let her just do that. But for one thing, she might now know more than he did about how his own father was doing, and he really couldn’t just let that be. For another, he really wanted to know how she was doing, especially if there was any chance he could help.

So he said, “How are things going?”

She sighed softly, and she had a too small smile when she turned her head. “For me or for Ben?”

“Both.”

“I don’t know about either of us,” she shrugged. “Also, I don’t know how much I should tell you about what we talked about. Given I’m a counselor by profession, our conversations could almost be automatically confidential, even if I’m not formally counseling him.”

“You’re a counselor?” Jake asked. He wasn’t sure why that threw him as much as it did, especially considering her blue collar. But he supposed he’d just associated that with Jadzia Dax having been a science person. _She’s her own person,_ he reminded himself harshly. _And she should especially be treated as such considering she’s got a slug in her she didn’t ask for and didn’t train for and has probably threatened her ability to stay her own person._

At least she didn’t seem offended thought, on the contrary she laughed a little and said, “Yeah, a little ironic at the moment, huh? You know, I wasn’t at all like this before. I had it all together. But I lay down on the operating table one person and I woke up a completely different person-well, I should say eight different people.”

“It’s fine,” Jake said hastily. “I understand. And I really do hope dad can help you, even if he is still having problems of his own right now. And hey,” he added, and on impulse reached out his hand across the table, “if I can be of any help either, just ask.”

“Thanks,” she said, and reached her own hand out to take his.

But when their fingers touched, suddenly the universe around Jake seemed to flash out into white light, and she and the restaurant dropped away:

_He was in a desert, he had no idea where. Opposite him stood a black human woman, one he simultaneously thought he’d never seen before and looked vaguely familiar to him, dressed in white. She was looking at him very gravely. “The Emissary has turned his back on Bajor,” she said._

_“He didn’t mean to!” Jake protested. “He had his orders and he had to obey them.” Then he thought about it for a moment, and continued, “Look, are you the Prophets? If you are, you need to go back to the Bajorans, because they didn’t do anything wrong, and they really need you.”_

_“We cannot go back to them as things are now,” said the Prophet-woman. “We need the Sisko to help. The Sisko...” As she spoke, she raised her hands, and touched the edges of Jake’s face, and looked down so tenderly at him, though he could’ve sworn a moment ago she had been shorter than him. “The Sisko can free us.”_

_“Okay,” said Jake. “How? You know, if you told dad what to do to fix things, I’m pretty sure he’d do it. In fact, why haven’t you appeared to him already, if it’s just a case of doing something, and not having to figure out what, huh?”_

_He was getting more pissed off with every word, until she moved her hands away to put them up. “Peace,” she said. “You must come here.”_

_“Here?” asked Jake. “Where’s ‘here’? I’m afraid I can’t identify a desert planet just by standing on it. And why me specifically? I’m not the Emissary.”_

_But all she did was turn around and walk off, though she beckoned after herself. Jake found himself stepping forward to follow..._

“Jake! Jake! Hello?” He was back in the restaurant, and Dax was frantically waving her hands in front of him. Her exclamations were followed by others, and Jake looked from face to anxious face, before turning back to an anxious Trill.

“Did Jadzia Dax ever have a vision of the Prophets?” he asked. “I mean, she had orbs in her lab, right?”

“She did have a vision when she looked into one of the orbs, yes,” said Dax, before she abruptly drifted off for a second, before finishing, “But it, um, didn’t have the Prophets in it; it was just a flashback to her own life.” It sounded like she really didn’t want to go into details; Jake wondered just what had been in that flashback. But Dax was continuing, “Why, did you just have one?”

“I did,” said Jake. “I was in a desert. There was this woman; I didn’t recognize her, which was weird, because I think the Prophets are supposed to look like people you know and see regularly, not someone you might have seen once in a photograph or something.” Then he remembered she probably knew that already, but never mind. “She said...she said dad had turned his back on Bajor, but then she said he could fix things, and then she said we had to go the desert, and, well,” he felt doubt creep in before he could say what he had to say next, wondering if maybe he’d been taking her words the wrong way. “She made it sound like I had to go there, though I guess dad should go too. Except we can’t, because when I asked where we were she didn’t tell me.”

“Maybe you should go downstairs and tell him about it?” Dax suggested, and that sounded like a good idea.

Meanwhile, downstairs, Benjamin Sisko was growing restless, more so by the minute. Not good, he knew, since they really had no idea when this assassin was going to strike, and it was possible he could be on lockdown for days, if not longer.

Ironic, he thought. All this summer, hoping, somewhere within him, that the listlessness would go away and he would want to get up and head back for Deep Space 9, or maybe just for Starfleet and space in general, and he hadn’t had any such feelings. Until now, when he was suddenly beset by an urge to act, just when he couldn’t.

It didn’t help that his instincts as a captain had suddenly kicked back in as well, and were telling him there was something off about this whole thing, and specifically about the woman who had delivered the warning. On the surface her story was not implausible, and while her lack of panic was unnerving, considering her running here without calling the authorities first had to be the kind of immediate reaction to events that was almost on impulse, she was a Starfleet officer, and keeping calm in such situations was a paramount thing officers had to learn. But somehow it still felt to him like she was holding something back.

There didn’t seem to be much he himself could do at the moment, though. He tried to keep himself busy by trying to put the storage room in order, grabbing a loose rag to dust. He was bent over one of the crates, trying not to cough, when something on the floor caught his eye.

It was a photograph of his father when he was young, and with him was a mysterious woman. She looked vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t recall seeing her in any specific pictures. He found himself just standing and staring, trying to figure that out.

It was in this state that his son found him when he hurried in, yelling, “Dad, I think I just had a vision from the Prophets!”

In his shock Ben dropped the photo, which fluttered to the ground. “Are you sure?” he asked, but then he saw Jake was looking down at what he had just dropped, transfixed. “Jake?”

“The woman…” he murmured, awed. “That woman was in the vision. Who is she?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen her before.”

“Seen who?” His father came walking in. When he saw where Jake was looking, he looked himself.

His eyes flew wide in horror and rage, and a moment later he had snatched the photo up. “Where’d you get this?” he demanded.

“Found it here just now,” said Ben. “Who’s the woman, dad?”

But his father, his voice still shaking with anger, said, “No one at all, you hear me? She’s no one at all.” And he had turned and fled before either son or grandson could ask him anything else.


End file.
